Ingénieur(e) logiciel Lunar Quake Service, FarSide Seismic Suite.

The Paris Institute of Earth Physics
A world-renowned geosciences research institute founded in 1921, associated with the CNRS, a component of the Université Paris Cité and employing more than 500 people, the IPGP covers all the disciplines of earth and planetary sciences through observation, experimentation and modelling, at all scales of time and space. The IPGP is also one of the space laboratories recognised by the CNES.

The research themes are structured through 4 major federative themes: Earth and planets interiors, Natural hazards, Earth system, Origins.

The IPGP is also in charge of accredited services in volcanology, seismology, magnetism, gravimetry and erosion and planetary seismology. In particular, the permanent observatories of the IPGP monitor the 4 active French overseas volcanoes in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion and Mayotte (REVOSIMA).

The IPGP hosts powerful computational resources and state-of-the-art experimental and analytical facilities and benefits from a first class technical support.

The training and doctoral studies department of the IPGP offers to its students training in geosciences which associates observation, quantitative analysis and modelling and which reflects the quality, the richness and the thematic diversity of the research carried out by the IPGP teams.

The team and/or the service
The Planetology and Space Sciences team of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and more particularly the InSight/FSS National Observation Service team (https://www.ipgp.fr/en/observation/insight/) is one of the few teams in the world to have developed and operated a planetary seismology experiment. Together with CNES and international partners, it ran the seismology experiment for the NASA InSight mission to Mars, and was selected again by NASA for the FarSide Seismic Suite lunar experiment.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) project aims to place a stand-alone instrument on the far side of the Moon to conduct seismic measurements. Almost 50 years after the Apollo missions, this project will be launched in 2025 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme. The far side of the Moon will be studied, and more specifically the Schrödinger crater, located near the South Pole, where the seismometer will be placed. The seismometer is a spare model of the SEIS instrument, which was placed on Mars as part of the InSight mission. IPGP has the scientific responsibility for the Lunar SEIS sensor (VBBZ) as well as for the Lunar Quake Service, and is collaborating with CNES and other French laboratories for this project. The Lunar Quake Service will be responsible for the regular analysis of the data, both to ensure that the instruments are working properly and to identify and locate the detected lunar earthquakes. The nominal mission duration is 4 lunar diurnal cycles or 4 Earth months with a high probability of a one-year mission extension after this nominal mission.

For more information on InSight: http://seis-insight.eu

For more information on FSS: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-farside-seismic-suite

Missions
The engineer will be responsible for leading and implementing Lunar Quake Service (LQS) software developments within the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) project.

The LQS must be the tool for observing and analysing lunar earthquakes in order to visualise the data in time and frequency, to document them with other visualised data (orbitography of the Moon, imagery and surface topography), to calibrate them, to carry out various treatments (rotation, filtering, cleaning), to carry out the phase points and azimuths of the ground motions, to classify the seismic events, but also to label all the other events that could occur, and finally to locate these events, either by associating them with known hypocentres of deep earthquakes on the visible side, or by reversing their position for any new focus or impact position.

Activities

• Analyse the needs and write the project specifications
• Define the software architecture
• Manage the project
• Develop the software components (visualisation, calibration, filtering, azimuth determination, cleaning, pointing, saving points in the database, etc.)
• Implement the automatic integration of data from the Moon into the LQS, provided by CNES in standard SEED format
• Interfacing software components provided by the project scientists (localisation, clustering, source and structure inversion)
• Supervise project deployment (local or server-based)
• Manage software code in a GitLab repository
• Write and update technical and user documentation

Expected skills
Knowledge

• Project management methodology
• Software engineering
• Information system concepts and architectures
• Programming languages (python, C/C++, Matlab)
• xml-based databases
• Operating systems (Linux, Mac OS, Windows)
• Version control system Git and GitLab
• Technical English
• Signal processing
• Experience in processing seismic and/or scientific time series data

Operational skills

• Develop and integrate signal processing and scientific software
• Develop and integrate graphical man-machine interfaces
• Facilitate a meeting
• Manage a project
• Analyse needs and translate them into technical specifications
• Apply standards, procedures and rules related to the activity
• Design technical and functional training actions

Skills

• Sense of organisation and priorities
• Autonomy
• Teamwork
• Rigour/ reliability

Constraints and risks
Working hours: working hours defined according to the internal regulations of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. A few teleconferences every two weeks in the 16:00-19:00 time slot for coordination with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
On-call duty: no on-call duty planned during phases B-D of the FSS project (2023-2024). Some potential on-call during phases E1-E2 in case of contract extension.
Travel : Some potential travel to Toulouse and Pasadena (USA).

Required training and experience
Design Engineer (Master’s degree or equivalent) or Research Engineer (Engineering school, PhD or equivalent)
Experience in the development of software for the visualisation and processing of geophysical or physical time series data.
Experience with seismic data visualization or processing software will be a plus but is not required.

How to apply

> CV and cover letter to be sent to the two contacts below.

> Deadline for application: 30 June 2023 for a job opening on 1 September.

> Contacts:

Philippe Lognonné, scientific manager, VBBZ-FSS experiment ( )

Taichi KAWAMURA, Head of Lunar Quake Service ()